Eighteen months ago, Firebase joined Google. Since then, our backend-as-a-service (BaaS) that handles the heavy lifting of building an app has grown from a passionate community of 110,000 developers to over 450,000.

Our current features -- Realtime Database, User Authentication, and Hosting -- make app development easier, but there’s more we can do, so today, we’re announcing a major expansion!

Firebase is expanding to become a unified app platform for Android, iOS and mobile web development. We’re adding new tools to help you develop faster, improve app quality, acquire and engage users, and monetize apps. On top of this, we’re launching a brand new analytics product that ties everything together, all while staying true to the guiding principles we’ve had from the beginning:

Work across platforms. We’ll support you whether you’re building for iOS, Web, or Android.

Integrate where possible. Firebase has one SDK, one console, and one place to go for documentation and support. You can mix-and-match any of our features and, where it makes sense, data flows between them to help you do more, faster.

Introducing Firebase Analytics

Firebase Analytics is our brand new, free and unlimited analytics solution for mobile apps. It benefits from Google’s experience with Google Analytics, and features some new capabilities for apps:

Firebase Analytics is user and event-centric and gives you insight into what your users are doing in your app. You can also see how your paid advertising campaigns are performing with cross-network attribution, which tells you where your users are coming from. You can see all of this from a single dashboard.

Firebase Analytics is also integrated with other Firebase offerings to provide a single source of truth for in-app activity and through a feature called Audiences. Audiences let you define groups of users with common attributes. Once defined, these groups can be accessed from other Firebase features -- to illustrate, we’ll reference Audiences throughout this post.

Develop Faster with Messaging, Storage, Config

To help you build better apps, our suite of backend services is expanding.

Google Cloud Messaging, the most popular cloud-to-device push messaging service in the world, is integrating with Firebase and changing its name to Firebase Cloud Messaging (FCM). Available for free and for unlimited usage, FCM supports messaging on iOS, Android, and the Web, and is heavily optimized for reliability and battery-efficiency. It’s built for scale and already sends 170 billion messages per day to two billion devices.

One of our most requested features is the ability to store images, videos, and other large files. We’re launching Firebase Storage so developers can easily and securely upload and download such files. Firebase Storage is powered by Google Cloud Storage, giving it massive scalability and allowing stored files to be easily accessed by Google Cloud projects. The Firebase Storage client SDKs have advanced logic to gracefully handle poor network conditions.

Firebase Remote Config gives you instantly-updatable variables that you can use to tune and customize your app on the fly to deliver the best experience to your users. You can enable or disable features or change the look and feel without having to publish a new version. You can also target configurations to specific Firebase Analytics Audiences so that each of your users has an experience that’s tailored for them.

In addition, we’re continuing to invest heavily in our existing backend products, Firebase Realtime Database, Firebase Hosting, and Firebase Authentication. Authentication has seen the biggest updates, with brand new SDKs, and an upgraded backend infrastructure. This provides added security, reliability, and scale using the same technologies that power Google’s own accounts. We’ve also added new Authentication features including email verification and account linking. For Hosting, custom domain support is now free for all developers, and the Database has a completely rebuilt UI. We’re working hard on other great Realtime Database features, stay tuned for those.

Introducing Test Lab and Crash Reporting

We’re adding two new offerings to Firebase to help you deliver higher quality apps.

When your app crashes, it’s bad for your users and it hurts your business. Firebase Crash Reporting gives you prioritized, actionable reports to help you diagnose and fix problems in your iOS or Android app after it has shipped. We’ve also connected Crash Reporting to Audiences in Firebase Analytics, so you can tell if users on a particular device, in a specific geography, or in any other custom segment are experiencing elevated crash rates.

Cloud Test Lab, announced last year at Google I/O, is now Firebase Test Lab for Android. Test Lab helps you find problems in your app before your users do. It allows for both automatic and customized testing of your app on real devices hosted in Google data centers.

Grow Your App with Notifications, Dynamic Links, and More

After you’ve launched your app, we can help you grow and re-engage users with five powerful growth features.

Firebase Notifications is a new UI built on top of the Firebase Cloud Messaging APIs that lets you easily deliver notifications to your users without writing a line of code. Using the Notifications console you can re-engage users, run marketing campaigns, and target messages to Audiences in Firebase Analytics.

Firebase Dynamic Links make URLs more powerful in two ways. First, they provide “durability” -- links persist across the app install process so users are taken to the right place when they first open your app. This “warm welcome” increases engagement and retention. Second, they allow for dynamically changing the destination of a link based on run-time conditions, such as the type of browser or device. Use them in web, email, social media, and physical promotions to gain insight into your growth channels.

Firebase Invites turns your customers into advocates. Your users can easily share referral codes or their favorite content via SMS or email to their network, so you can increase your app's reach and retention.

Firebase App Indexing, formerly Google App Indexing, brings new and existing users to your app from the billions of Google searches. If your app is already installed, users can launch it directly from the search results. New users are presented with a link to install your app.

AdWords, Google’s advertising platform for user acquisition and engagement, is now integrated with Firebase. Firebase can track your AdWords app installs and report lifetime value to the Firebase Analytics dashboard. Firebase Audiences can be used in AdWords to re-engage specific groups of users. In-app events can be defined as conversions in AdWords, to automatically optimize your ads, including universal app campaigns.

Monetize Your App With AdMob

To help you generate revenue from your app and build a sustainable business, we’ve integrated Firebase with AdMob, an advertising platform used by more than 1 million apps. We’ve made it easier to get started with AdMob when you integrate the Firebase SDK into your app. Using AdMob, you can choose from the latest ad formats, including native ads, which help provide a great user experience.

Introducing a New Console, Documentation, and SDK

Along with new feature launches, we’re moving our website and documentation to a new home: firebase.google.com.

We’re also launching a brand new console to manage your app. It is completely redesigned and rebuilt for improved ease of use, and we’ve deeply integrated it with other Google offerings, like Google Cloud and Google Play.

Firebase now uses the same underlying account system as Google Cloud Platform, which means you can use Cloud products with your Firebase app. For example, a feature of Firebase Analytics is the ability to export your raw analytics data to BigQuery for advanced querying. We’ll continue to weave together Cloud and Firebase, giving you the functionality of a full public cloud as you grow.

You can also link your Firebase account to Google Play from our new console. This allows data, like in-app purchases, to flow to Firebase Analytics, and ANRs (application not responding) to flow to Firebase Crash Reporting, giving you one place to check the status of your app.

A fixed-rate plan for early-stage startups who need a predictable monthly price

A metered pay-as-you-go plan that scales with the largest apps

Some Things Stay the Same

Many things are changing, but Firebase’s core principles remain the same. We care deeply about providing a great developer experience through easy-to-use APIs, intuitive interfaces, comprehensive documentation, and tight integrations. We’re committed to cross-platform development for iOS, Android, and the Web, and when you run into trouble, we’ll provide support to help you succeed.

If you were using a Firebase feature before today -- like the Realtime Database, GCM, or App Indexing -- there’s no impact on your app. We’ll continue to support you, though we recommend upgrading to the latest SDK to access our new features.

More to Come

As far as we’ve come, this is still early days. We’ll continue to refine and add to Firebase. For example, the JavaScript SDK does not yet support all the new features. We’re working quickly to close gaps, and we’d love to hear your feedback so we can improve. You can help by requesting a feature.

Get Started!

All the new features are ready-to-go, and already in use by apps like Shazam, SkyScanner, PicCollage, and more. Get started today by signing up, visiting our new site, or reading the documentation to learn more.

We had some issues on launch day (it was really popular), so sorry about that! Try again, and if you're still hitting problems please file a ticket with our support team: https://firebase.google.com/support/contact/troubleshooting/

So it's possible to export the raw data from Firebase Analytics to BigQuery. What about 'Triggers' (https://goo.gl/iPM6aE) to sync in realtime to the Google Cloud Platform? And why only in the 'Blaze plan'?

Be happy with what's already there. There are awesome features and honestly, who needs email verification when there's built in google/twitter/... accounts. These days people don't want to have to create an account.

Same story for image upload, redundancy of the same picture 100 all across the web pollutes our little planet, and I believe that there's gravatar included in the auth object, anyway implementing a user profile with picture isn't that long.

Sorry about that! Hopefully the database is loading OK for you now, but if not please file a ticket with our support team, and include the details of your project: https://firebase.google.com/support/contact/troubleshooting

Regarding invalid API key, check that the key looks valid (e.g. not empty). If it does, it may be an issue with the localhost whitelisting: you should be able to find the key in the Google Developer Console and whitelist your domain and port: https://console.developers.google.com/project/_/apis/credentials

I have seen that there now are a Sign up confirmation mail and a Email address change mail confirmation as well.Are these mandatory? My app uses the email/password auth method but I sign up my users "anonymously" with a random Email@myowndomain so we can manage auth rules (and users can later register with their own mail aka update their mail address).If these mail confirmations are mandatory, this is a big issue for us.

What about cross-network attribution? In your announcement you say: "You can also see how your paid advertising campaigns are performing with cross-network attribution, which tells you where your users are coming from." Which Networks are you referring to? Are you only including admob and adwords or will this service offering compete with Appsflyer and the likes?

There are a lot of networks supported! https://support.google.com/firebase/answer/6317518?hl=en has the instructions - if you log into the console for a project you can see the whole list from Aarki to Vungle.

@slaction Thanks for the feedback! Your comments are definitely welcome here. But we care deeply about our awesome community, so keep things constructive and civil. Express your opinion, but do it with class!

Firebase is amazing. I can't describe how cool it is. But there is still something I cannot understand. Does this backend service mode really work? Almost every app needs some server-side logic processing. I often encounter scenarios where I feel really hard to accomplish without server-side code.

Thanks lord for answering my prayer. Firebase Storage! Anyway I'm looking for another feature like database string query (ex: username LIKE %username%) which has not supported since the previous sdk. Does it support now?

Amazing work thanks! One thing that'd really change the game for me is something like AWS Lambda - the ability to run small pieces of code on DB events and thus eliminating the need for separate Node hosting/scaling etc

Hi in the old panel dashboard I had Analytics where I could check the performance and general usage (db bandwidth, data stored, concurrent users, ecc.) but I can't find them anymore. Analytics now is referred only to Android and IOS apps. I am testing firebase with a webapp and i need same analytics as before in order to check general performances and usage of my firebase account.

Sorry! We're planning to get the various bindings upgraded to the new SDK, but it'll take a little time - pull requests always welcome of course! Note that you can stick with the old auth and SDK even after upgrading a project if you want as well, and switch authentication methods after the bindings are updated.

I know I have ADD and therefore skim most of what I read... but I did not see mention of a DEADLINE for migration. Feels like this is a VERY important bit of info for the 450K developers currently using the platform. So... what is the deadline for migration?

Good stuff, but I'm shocked, given Googles search and indexing abilities, that one STILL must cobble together a service along with something like ElasticSearch, just to have nice searching in pulldowns and search boxes over model types on specific fields.

Example, searching for an Order by Customer name, using a nice index on Customer.name + Customer.domain, that does basic ngram search with suggested spellings..

Oh Well, the Firebase DB still kicks butt, but now all your API docs completely suck, compared to what was there with respect to code samples and explanations. And in the SDK/APIs 'bundling' other services under the firebase namespace.. both those moved the 'developer experience' in the wrong direction.. the blog said:

What would make a huge plus for us next would be true **OFFLINE-FIRST** support and for the Web SDK like it is for iOS and Android SDKs.

We currently cannot afford to go native on every platform and the Web SDK + Polymer work great even on tablets and cell phones. But if a customer is offline, they can't work on their project unless they remembered to load it first when online. Also hitting refresh or back by mistake causes all the changes to be lost! Thank you for considering this feature soon!

I'm super excited about Firebase Cloud Messaging. I've been looking for options to pair with Ionic Framework (and something that's more stable than the Ionic Push beta), especially given that Parse is shutting down.

Firebase Analytics are not really free. I learned at I/O today that you only get 500 events. Beyond 500 events you have to use parameters, and there is no dashboard for parameters, you have to use BigQuery, which isn't free. So free and unlimited is a bit of stretch. You can track if a user presses 250 buttons or 125 A/B tests, and then it is time to pay, unless I'm missing something here.

Hi! I think we chatted at IO today, but I have since had a chance to chat with the analytics team a little. Their suggestion to use a user property to distinguish the experiment: so have a property my_experiment, and a value for each variety in it, then reuse the same events. Hope that helps!

Thank Ian. That makes sense. If I give events generic names, I can reuse them, by hijacking the user property to actually be a "build property". I'm sure that will work for me with some careful planning. Hopefully we'll see parameter filtering in the dashboard someday. :-D Thanks again for the research.

Perhaps I'm dim, but none of my event show up when filtering by a custom user property. Feel free to send me a direct message via Google+ if you want to get to the bottom of this issue. Otherwise, I'm still stuck at 125 A/B tests from this "free and unlimited" platform. (I just got an advertisement email for Firebase today. It didn't say "Free and unlimited collection", it said "Free and Unlimited". I expect something called "Analytics" and "Free and Unlimited" to be free and unlimited analytics, not just collection.)

Unity SDK Support? when you search for 'firebase unity' in google you get the following title as the 1st result: 'Early Preview: Unity3d Support! - Firebase' but the links redirect to this page with no mention of a UNITY3D SDK, is it still cooking?

Hi! In theory I like it, but in practice I'm having some problems. First and foremost is that I migrated my app, updated the firebase-tools, re-initialized the app as firebase, got a storage bucket and set it up, but when I hit the Upload File button in the console nothing happens. Nothing. No message, no feedback. Crickets. What am I doing wrong?

Hi, following the new web firebase connection I am trying to set my firebase database from a non https website and I get the error net::ERR_INSECURE_RESPONSE. Using previous web firebase connection I didn't get any security error. My domain is validated from the google developers console.

Would be really nice if the documentation was better for Analytics. Also, I have been trying to get Firebase to work with Unity game engine for the past 24h with only disappointment as result. Proper support (and proper documentation) for Unity would be much wanted!

OMG Firebase has made app dev very easy for me. ive been struggling with php and mysql but now its all simplified, am still learning and very soon am flooding the store with my cool apps. Thanks GOOGLE FOR ALWAYS MAKING THINGS EASY and great inventions everyday

Awesome news, with the demise of Parse its everything Parse was and so much more. I was planning on moving my mobile app platform to the Google Cloud and this takes care of all the other services that Parse offered with my cloud of choice already integrated!

Hello, I need to create a database for a game in the Unity3D, is a base where I can insert information and images and thus, in the application downloaded by users this content appears. I would Firebase use, today there is some method to do this?

I cant do anything in the console. Is it currently down? I keep getting an error statingThere was an error checking for Firebase.com projects. If you have projects to import into the new console, make sure you've linked your account and reload this page.What gives?